


They had No Idea

by deutschtard



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Anger, Flashbacks, Gen, Other, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-28
Updated: 2012-04-28
Packaged: 2017-11-04 11:23:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deutschtard/pseuds/deutschtard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Capitol residents had no idea how it felt to be on the other side of The Hunger Games, and Haymitch hated them for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They had No Idea

They had  _no idea_. That little fluffy haired boy and his sister had  _no idea_  what it would be like if they ever ended up in mortal danger like he’d faced in the arena, like he’d seen children die in for the past 30 or more years. And they never would. He’d stopped counting consciously, but each pair of eyes he’d met and learned about at each games he’d mentored flashed before him.

The boy stabbed the girl and the entire family laughed because the sword was plastic, the injuries were only faked, and they would sit on their couches with sweets and food and watch 23 more children—just a few years older than their own—die, watch their blood splatter across the grass or in the ocean or on the snow.

They would never know,  _could_  never know the terror, the feeling that anything and everything could kill you at any second. The worst they had to worry about was getting food stains on their clothes. They would never understand that these children had families, too. That back at home in each of the districts, two families were watching in terror every second of every day, waiting for that announcement that their son or daughter wasn’t going to be coming home. And they didn’t get any compensation like the Victors, either. They simply had to move on. That was it. Almost none of them could afford funerals, especially in the outlying districts, they had to settle for burying them in a shallow grave. At least the Capitol was  _gracious_ enough to provide caskets. 

He hated them, their pretentious over-manufactured looks, their skin dyed unnatural colors. It made him sick to sit here year after year and pretend that he didn’t hate them. That’s what the alcohol was for. If he drank enough, he could forget that these people, these  _fucking_ people, thought it was fun to watch poor children and teenagers mutilate each other. Now, seventy-four years later, no one even remembered the Dark Days, not what they were taught about them, but what had actually happened. No one was still alive from those days, and who was to say the Capitol hadn’t made up the story they told anyway?

This year, he was putting up with this, even though watching that child stab his sister with no remorse—laughing even—felt like he was being stabbed, too. There was no longer a scar across his middle where he’d nearly been gutted, but his stomach still hurt, phantom pains from 25 years ago, every time he thought of these people watching the games with laughter on their lips, rooting for the tributes, no, the CHILDREN, like they were little more than computer simulated people.

He would persevere because this year, he had fighters, this year, something different was happening. Haymitch didn’t know how, but he knew this year something was going to change the face of The Games as these Capitol scumbags knew it. So he stood, put on his Sponsor Winning Smile, and walked through the throng to find some rich bastards to fleece for every cent he could get from them.

They had to make it, to show the Capitol they didn’t own the Districts anymore. And Haymitch would fight for them. Every single ounce of strength he had in him would go into helping Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. He’d even stopped drinking to help them, and he would keep it up until one of them came home. He would endure the pain of watching the childrens’ deaths treated like sport, of imagining how these cretins must have clamored over his Games. He’d ignore it as best as he could; He had to, there was no choice.

He  _would_  bring them home.


End file.
